Perfume, like wine, has reviews. They, too, are full of obscure terms, no help at all to the lay person. The only reason perfume talk doesn't inspire New Yorker cartoons and parodies by curmudgeons is that normal people don't try it.

I don't know bergamot from civet, but even those who do can't agree on what they smell like. While there's usually a consensus among wine critics, the perfume crowd is all over the map. A scent that's flowery and delicate to one is overbearingly masculine to another and foul to a third.

This jibes with my experience of tasting wine with a range of people. After all, we experience these things differently, right? Not according to Luca Turin.

Turin - the bad-boy, real-life hero of Chandler Burr's book The Emperor of Scent - is notorious for proposing a new theory of smell, which the scientific community doesn't like. Not only have they invested a lot in the current theory, but Turin doesn't play well with others, lacking patience for bureaucratic protocol.

Like critic Robert Parker with wine, Turin claims to experience perfumes as three-dimensional objects and remembers every one he's ever encountered. Unlike most critics, he has a way with words. From one description:

"This fruit salad does something it has no right to do: break hearts. If this were music, it would be Bizet's Symphony in C. If it were a car it would be a Facel-Vega Facellia. If it were an aircraft it would be a 1959 Caravelle in Air France livery. Anyway, go smell it."

Another: "This thing smells like a person. To be exact, thanks to the milky lactone note, it smells like an infant's breath mixed with his mother's hair spray. . . . What it can do, as all great art does, is create a yearning, then fill it with false memories of an invented past . . . "

Woe to bad perfume. This "poverty-stricken, sweet-powdery affair . . . belongs in a tree-shaped diffuser dangling from the rearview mirror of a Moscow taxi."

He worships great perfume and rages at bean counters who change classic formulas to save money. But he has equal respect for "functional perfume," the kind in Ty-D-bol or Head & Shoulders. He would pay real money for a sample of Stergene, a 1972 fabric softener.

He's baffled by current attitudes toward smell, which relegate it to a third-class, embarrassing sense. "Real men don't do this," he notes. "I have found that male scientists frequently blush and titter like schoolchildren when given smelling strips during a lecture."

Except the French. "The idea that things should be slightly dirty, overripe, slightly fecal is everywhere in France," Turin says. "They like rotten cheese and dirty sheets and unwashed women." Which explains why wine tasting, considered namby-pamby in America, is a respectable pastime for French truck drivers.

Turin pokes holes in everything we think we know about smell. He takes issue with the notion that everyone experiences aromas differently. The heart of his theory concerns a nasal spectrometer remarkably accurate in pinpointing seemingly limitless smells. If your "pine needles" is my "mothballs," the problem is our labels, not our noses. After all, no nose ever mistakes sulfur or mint.

But then how do you explain divergences in taste? Why did my college roommate's White Shoulders nauseate me? Why does my mailman love white zinfandel? What good are descriptions of wine or perfume if no one agrees?

I don't know, but it's good to know your nose works as well as anyone else's. Don't be intimidated if you can't smell the boysenberry compote and French oak touted on the label. You can learn them after I learn to recognize bergamot.

Jester@corkjester.com

Recommended

WHITE

* Zonin Primo Amore Pinot Grigio 2006 (Italy) $7

* Bonterra Vineyards Lake-Mendocino County Sauvignon Blanc 2006 (California) $13

* Santadi Cala Silente Vermentino di Sardegna 2006 (Italy) $15

* Pine Ridge Clarksburg Chenin Blanc-Viognier 2006 (California) $16

RED

* Terra Rosa Mendoza Old Vine Malbec 2004 (Argentina) $11

* Rabbit Ridge Paso Robles "Bunny Cuvee" Red Wine (California) $12

* L'Ecole No. 41 Columbia Valley "Recess Red" (Washington) 2005 $15

* Alkoomi Frankland River Western Australia Shiraz Viognier 2004 (Australia) $23